Hello everybody, I'm happy to use Growl in great bunch of apps I have. But last few weeks I'm thinking about unifying notification interfaces of different systems and platforms. The problem is that everybody get accustomed to nice and useful things very fast, and such thing is Growl. Due to technical reasons I'm obliged to use Windows at work but I really want to see same notifications about mail, calendar events, projects compilation etc. Yes, there are projects like Snarl and GrowlForWindows. Okay, I've tried both of them. Unlike mac apps, there is no tendency in windows software to use any global notification system. There are several plugins, some are better for Snarl, other for GfW. And I surely don't want to keep both of them running and organize applications here and there. Growl uses Object Distribution and GrowlTalk; Snarl supports SNP (resembles GrowlTalk a bit), GNTP, JSON, Win32API and future version might support some HTTP requests. Growl for Windows uses GNTP (Mime-like) and GrowlTalk.
Wow, no protocol is supported by all three systems that actually are designed to do very same things. I'm a java developer and I really want to use notification in my projects widely. The thing I want suggest is a unified platform-independent protocol over UDP and TCP transport. This protocol should support all available features and could be easily expanded. My experience persuades me to suggest xml for that protocol since: - it is quite human-readable; - it could be easily checked using xsd schema; - there are tools for auto-parsing and generating xml messages of protocol using xsd schema; - it could contain binary data (base64-encoded), so icons, sound etc. could be embedded into messages; - it could be easily expanded. Speaking about encoding of a message, it could be sent with a header of 2 (or 4) bytes with length of following message. If you accept my suggestion, I would be ready to suggest a version of that protocol and take responsibility for Java-binding upon myself. Well, I wrote too much. I just want something useful, no matter what platform app is running on. Network communication from one host to another one should use the same protocol, no matter what platform does sender or addressee has. Thank you very much for reading my stream of consciousness :) I will cross-post this message to Snarl and Growl for Windows discussion groups. Thanks again. Best regards, Daniel -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Growl Discuss" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/growldiscuss?hl=en.
